Collaborative Creativity Workshops for Innovation

Collaboration Workshops for Leaders and Teams

For innovation to flourish, organizations must create an environment that fosters creativity; bringing together multi-talented groups of people who work in close collaboration together— exchanging knowledge, ideas and shaping the direction of the future. Easier said than done in siloed environments.

The ability to collaborate across disciplines, business units and customers is crucial to your innovation success —especially when you are engaged in lean, agile, and/or design thinking processes. Good collaboration fosters original thinking, creativity, and innovation.

“Bad collaboration is worse than no collaboration.” —Morten T Hansen

Explore the principles and practices of effective collaboration in this experiential workshop.

Workshops are customized for your organization to help leaders and teams in marketing, sales, HR, engineering, IT, finance, R&D and related functions.

Topics include:

• Assess your collaboration IQ: A self-evaluation tool.
• Collaboration principles and practices
• Establishing rules of engagement for collaboration
• Distinctions between collaboration, cooperation, and consensus
• Identify and overcome the four barriers to collaboration
• Build cross-functional cohesion without losing individualism
• Collaborative leadership practices
• Foster a collaborative culture that values talent, diversity, relationships and connections.
• T shape thinking: Drawing upon the depth of your expertise as well as having the breadth of knowledge to contribute to others
• How to critique an idea and give constructive feedback
• Decision-making

Workshops are based in part on the research of Morten T Hansen, Warren Bennis, and Google re:Work, as well as Orchestrating Collaboration at Work: Using music, improv, storytelling and other arts to improve teamwork (a book on collaboration that was conceived and written collaboratively).

Action-based Learning Activities

Hands-on activities involve arts-based approaches to create safety, build trust, find shared values, shift perceptions, and uncover the ‘group gold’ that leads to breakthroughs in problem-solving. The arts are especially useful in helping people from different cultures find common ground and build cohesion.

• Theatre Improv games, such as Yes And vs Yes But to build on ideas rather than tear them apart
• Collaborative poetry writing to solve problems
• Visual -dialogues to communicate through imagery
• Painting a shared vision
• Question-storming and other idea generation techniques

Bonus: No fake team-building exercises.

Learning Outcomes:

• Develop the collaborative leadership and management skills required to create trusting, collaborative environments that inspire and engage diverse groups of people to co-create.
• Build relationships to form networks and self-organizing collegial communities of practice to enhance serendipity and innovation.
• Know when not to collaborate, and avoid wasting time and energy when collaboration is unnecessary.
• Leave the workshop with proven methods for cultivating collaboration in groups and teams.

Time frame: half-day to two days

See also Adventures in Learning about Creativity

How can we help your organization collaborate and innovate?